The Future De-Trumpization of the US

Nikita Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death by executing Beria and winning the power struggle with Stalin's heir apparent, Malenkov. Politically astute but rough/gruff, he liberalized - relatively - life in the Soviet Union, most notably by allowing the publication of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962. Brezhnev coup in 1964 toppled Khrushchev and pushed him into retirement, the only Soviet leader to not die in office.

Khrushchev's most important achievement was his so-called Secret Speech presented at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union where Khrushchev denounced Stalin, Stalin's cult of personality which allowed great abuses of power, his military leadership, and much more, beginning - emphatically - a de-Stalinization process in the Soviet Union and many of its communist allies.

Reading the Communism entry from the 1957 Britannica Book of the Year - for no reason other than I enjoy history without additional context provided by the passing of time - I read a quote from the secret speech with great interest:

Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation, and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this concept or tried to prove his viewpoint, and the correctness of his position was doomed to removal from the leading collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation. This was especially true during the period following the 17th party congress, when many prominent party leaders and rank-and-file party workers, honest and dedicated to the cause of communism, fell victim to Stalin's despotism.

-Khrushchev's Secret Speed, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Despite being almost seventy years, the quote scares me: substitute Trump for Stalin and you describe the United States today: a despot who insists on absolute obedience and subservience of all around him and in fact the entire country, much beyond Congress kowtowing to Bush after the 9/11 attacks on any number of terrorism-related subjects. As in 2001, in 2025 disagreement is seen as defiance or even treason.

Britannica made an editorial comment on the Secret Speech which raised more fears:

The question which Khrushchev did not answer, and which his audience did not ask, was about the validity of a system which made such unbelievable governmental excesses possible and veiled them for many years in a cloud of the most exaggerated praises of governmental policy and leadership ever known in history.

- Britannica 1975 Book of the Year, "Communism", p240

Seven months into Trump's presidency, new warning signs and concerns appear almost daily about the current administration's behavior, how it attempts to operate as a dictatorship without the niceties, expectations, and processes of a functional democracy....and more concerning is the explicit/implicit support provided by the legislative and judicial branches whom are intended to rein in such behavior and ensure the Constitution is adhered to. Something bad is happening.

The final analysis is (unfortunately) only possible after Trump's term ends - assuming he doesn't find or manufacture a loophole - but a future president, in an address to the nation may be explaining and denouncing how Trump's cult-of-personality took US democracy dangerously astray. It won't be a secret speech, but it will be just as damning.

I can't wait.

Image Credit

Nikita Khrushchev from Granger Historical Picture Archive.